No, he would not have.  Are you sure you understand how Bitcoin works?

I doubt that, but of the blocks he is known to control, I'd wager he has some special intention for those.  When he was still here, he was offered $50 for a single bitcoin from the genesis block; when the going rate was under a nickel.  He refused, stating that those were his legacy.  That could be interpreted in many ways, but I thought s/he intended those early blocks to go to his heirs.

Without a doubt, Mish did it with the most profound detail and accuracy of any I know of.  He was tracking the progression of the housing market over a silhouette of the graph of the rise and fall of the real estate market in Japan before and after it's great crash in the 80's.  It was odd how well it tracked. It's statistical corrolation was above 90% IIRC.

Mish Shedlock did.  I know there were at least a few more that I paid attention to.  Several at motleyfool.

no

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, it's complicated, but yes.

One method currently available is to use a 'light client' that only downloads and keeps a copy of the block headers plus the blocks that contain confirmed transactions related to it's own wallet.dat balance.  The wallet.dat keeps a copy of the particular transactions anyway, so it's relatively easy to do, but I know of no desktop clients that don't use a full-client model.  The problem here is that, while light clients can prove that they owned those coins at one time, they are dependent upon the vendor's client being a full client (or have some other method of full verification) in order to spend coins; and light clients have issues with acceptance of coins, because they can't independently confirm that a transaction received is still valid.  Only that the coins were once owned by the sender, and (usually, but not absolutely) that the transactions offered should fit in the block where the sender claims they came from.

Another method is what I've been calling "naked block transmission protocol" but I'm sure that is not what Gavin and the developers are calling it.  Wherein a new block, even for a full client, is broadcast only with the header and the full merkle tree; thus stripped of the actual transaction data.  On the assumption that all full clients would have already seen the vast majority of the transaction data when it was released loose on the network up to 10 minutes prior.  This would improve the network throughput from between 2 to 10 times, or about 6 for the average block.  This wouldn't improve a full-client bootstrapping time at all, but, a kind of vendor's client could be developed from this that has more data than a light client but not as much as a full client.

There is also the parallel network method, that Stratum & a couple of android clients are using.

And for full clients that no longer need old data locally, there is the pruning protocol that has always been in Bitcoin, but never implimented; which would allow full clients to discard long spent transactions.

Because it became fairly obvious to many users that MtGox itself was failing, and therefore the MtGox trade price wasn't real.  The other exchanges never got anywhere near $100.

There are good reasons for such a US centric perspective.  Since at least 1945, the United States has been the political and economic guiding force of the entire English speaking world.  Which, thanks to the British, was and remains the only truly global empire to ever exist.

And don't forget, that Japan remains a US protectorate.  If you don't think that US government agencies do have an influence on the MtGox case in Japan, you're delusional.  I'm not claiming that is how the world should be, I'm saying that is how it actually is.  One of the obvious and professed motivations for Satoshi to create Bitcoin in the beginning.

Well, yes and no.  No, to the degree that the Fed is just another social construct, and there cannot be any real consensus among the human beings that make up the Fed; and yes, that some of those same people have more institutional influence than others and that some subset of those influential persons think in terms of 'threats' to their institution.  Among those influential persons, Bitcoin & derivitives are regarded as a systemic threat, they just don't really know (or can agree upon) how to respond.

Short answer.  No.

Longer answer. No, not yet anyway. Controlling bitcoins does not necessarily equate to controlling Bitcoin (in particular) or cryptocurrencies (in general); but nor does that mean that owning bitcoins doesn't provide some degree of influence in the realm.

Um, no it doesn't.  The constitutions says that IT is the supreme law of the land.  The constitution doesn't even grant the Supreme Court the power to judge the constitutionality of laws, that's just something that they assumed they could do, and there isn't really any court capable of overridding that assumption.  Technically, the House of Representives has the power to sensor/override a Supreme court ruling; but this has actually never occured.

“The average American in 1940 had an 8th grade education. The post-war prosperity of this country was built by 8th graders. 8th grade America won the Second World War, and then had that big post-war 1950s prosperity. Now we stay in school twice as long, have twice as much attention from school teachers, and for no purpose. The longer you keep people in education — if you pretend that college is universal, it becomes middle school. If everybody goes to college it’s middle school, that’s what it is, that’s what it will be. You take away so many people’s most productive years. It leads to later economic contribution, later family formation, it has all kinds of consequences. And the education that matters is still K through 8. Because if you screw up K through 8, you can spend the next 20 years trying to play catch-up, and it doesn’t really make any difference. And that’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see a stronger telescope education. I’d like to see a return back to the spirit of single-town school districts, and I’d like to see American education delivered out of the hands of the present educational establishment, and Common Core does none of those things, which is why it’s to me part of the problem, not the solution.”

Yes, it's called medical tourism, and it's not just Singapore.  There are many reasons that the health care costs in the United States are high; some are directly related to government regulations (including Obamacare) and some are not.  One really big contributing factor is that health care professionals in general and specialist doctors in particular make significantly more money for the same skillset in the US than most other places in the world.  Granted, there are exceptions depending upon the specialty, but there is a very good reason that many of the best doctors from former British colonies have moved to the US in the past 30 years.  Odds are high they already speak the language well enough, and they can't make the same kind of income, nor expect the same quality of life in general, by staying in India or Trinidad.  For the Americans here, how often do you end up with a doctor (even a general prac) that has an accent?  Ironicly, Obamacare stands a decent chance of actually affecting this trend; by undercutting the medical payments regime in place for insurance companies and employers, income growth in the health care industry is likely to slow for some time.

We can, we just have to pay out of pocket for it, since we're not citizens of Singapore or Malaysia.

Economic law has not changed in the past 4 years, so this post is no more correct today than it wasn't 4 years ago.  Go take an economics class.

It's this intuitive insight that Anonymint overlooks.  The basic fact that any such actions by malicious actors will, eventually, expose themselves; and other actors will act in a different manner.  It's basic Praxeology.

Yes, the US health care system works very well.  Obamacare isn't health care, it's health insurance.  Health insurance in the US does not work very well.

The first askii character denotes the address version.  Currently, Bitcoin only recognizes two address versions, the one that you are familiar with that starts with a "1" and a testing version that starts with an "a" iirc.  The running network just ignores the "a" one unless your node is set to participate in the "testnet".  Future versions of addresses could use different keypair algos, or denote a sub-satoshi value, or have other uses such as denoting an address that can only be verfied with a script.

No, a QR code has internal checksums for alignment, and the addresses have internal checksums for input errors.  The odds of getting an internally correct, but still the wrong, address from a QR code scanning is astronomical.

Good luck with that.